Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  This account, though not without its own mysteries, seems to me to banish any possibility that Ageyev was Nabokov or that, as has been suggested by at least one American reviewer (Ronald K. Siegel, “M. Ageyev’s Novel with Cocaine: Russian Fiction or Snow Job?,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, Vol. 17, no. 1 [January–March 1985]), the novel is a modern fabrication, riddled with anachronistic drug usages. Dr. Siegel’s other suggestion, that Ageyev plagiarized an earlier, Italian novel concerning cocaine addiction, by Dino Segre under the pen name “Pitigrilli” (Cocaina; Milan: Casa Editrice Sonzagno, 1921), is still possible, though his cited parallelisms did not persuade me. If, as Dr. Yanovsky’s letter states, Lydia Chervinskaya is alive in Paris and visited Levi/Ageyev in Constantinople, more light could still be shed on the identity of the author of Cocaine than Michael Henry Heim’s introduction shares with American readers.

  ‡ Sakharov died of a heart attack, in Moscow, at the age of sixty-eight, on December 14, 1989, after a long day of debate in the suddenly contentious Congress of People’s Republics, to which he was an elected representative. A year before, he had visited the United States, and been pronounced in no need of heart surgery.

  OTHER COUNTRIES HEARD FROM

  Chronicles and Processions

  CHRONICLE IN STONE, by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian anonymously. 277 pp. The Meredith Press, 1987.

  BALTASAR AND BLIMUNDA, by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. 336 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

  Albanians are known for their ferocity, isolation, and ultra-Communism, and not for their modern literature; yet Ismail Kadare, born in 1936, has a considerable European reputation, and the second of his works to be published here, Chronicle in Stone,* is no mere curiosity but a thoroughly enchanting novel—sophisticated and accomplished in its narrative deftness and lyrical economy, yet drawing strength from its roots in one of Europe’s most primitive societies. Kadare has been likened to Gabriel García Márquez, and both writers tell of towns still shimmering with magic and dominated by clannishness; Kadare’s nameless mountain city, no doubt based upon his own native Gjirokastër, seems less whimsical than García Márquez’s Macondo, less willfully twisted into surreality.

  Kadare’s is a city made entirely of stone, “from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with grey slates like gigantic scales,” and so steep that “the top of one house might graze the foundation of another” and a drunk falling in the street winds up on the roof of a house. Though the narrative takes place during the Second World War, the city harbors timeless customs: brides’ faces are decorated with “starlike dots, cypress branches, and signs of the zodiac, all floating in the white mystery of powder,” and outbreaks of magic cause people to lock up their hair clippings and fireplace ashes. The erection of a statue in the town square years before had seemed to the natives an alarming novelty:

  A metal man? Was such a creation really necessary? Might it not cause trouble? At night, when everyone was sleeping as God had ordained, the statue would be out there standing erect. Day and night, summer and winter, it would stand.… To avoid trouble there was no unveiling ceremony. People stood and stared in wonder at the bronze warrior, hand on his pistol, who gazed severely down into the square as if asking, “Why didn’t you want me?” That night someone threw a blanket over the bronze man’s shoulders. From then on, the city’s heart went out to its statue.

  When a Greek soldier shoots the statue in the thigh, people “had the feeling they were limping. Others actually were limping.”

  The prevalent animism is doubly intense in the sensibility of the unnamed child at the center of the novel. He anthropomorphizes the raindrops talking in the gutter, and the cistern beneath the house that they flow into: “I liked the cistern a lot and often leaned over its rim and had long talks with it. It had always been ready to answer me in its deep, cavernous voice.” In his mind the city is a stone creature clinging to its mountain, the streets creep and plunge and crash into one another (“a collision from which both streets emerged crooked”), and the warplanes that use the nearby air strip acquire vivid personalities. A child’s self-centered, metaphoric way of seeing generates a constant poetry:

  The little cloud in the sky lurched ahead drunkenly. It had turned long and skinny now. Life in the sky must have been pretty boring in the summer. Not much happened there. The little cloud crossing the sky the way a man crosses a deserted square in the noonday heat melted away before reaching the north. I had noticed that clouds died very fast. Then their remains drifted in the sky for a long time. It was easy to tell the dead clouds from the live ones.

  The voice of innocence and gusts of gossip relay the tale, though the chapters are interlarded with fragments of newspaper, proclamation, and historical chronicle. The Italians occupy the city, bringing with them nuns, a brothel, and an airfield; the British bomb the city; the Greeks momentarily occupy it; the Italians return and retreat again; Albanian partisans of various political stripes descend from the hills; and, finally, the Germans occupy the city. Most of its inhabitants flee ahead of the yellow-haired invader, and then slowly return: “Again the tender flesh of life was filling the carapace of stone.” With the German occupation, the chronicle ends, as if its marvellous tone of childish fable could no longer be supported by memory. An adult voice tells us at the end, “A very long time later I came back to the grey immortal city. My feet timidly trod the spine of its stone-paved streets.… Often, striding along wide lighted boulevards in foreign cities, I sometimes stumble in places where no one ever trips. Passers-by turn in surprise, but I always know it’s you. Rising up suddenly out of the asphalt and then sinking back in, deep down.”

  One would like to know where these foreign boulevards were, and how Ismail Kadare was able to produce, under the notoriously repressive and xenophobic Hoxha regime, an art so refined and so free in its feeling. Hoxha is referred to in a late chapter, as a hunted resistance leader and a former, once “well-behaved” resident of the city, but without any flattery or obsequious emphasis. The waves of competing authority that move through the city are seen, like spells of weather, in terms of their local effects purely, and the Communist characters participate in the internecine brutality without rising above it. The bits of prose between the first-person chapters reduce history to a nonprogressive flutter of old feuds and fresh slogans. The most ominous event is the execution, by the German occupiers, of old Kako Pino, the painter of brides’ faces, who is seized by a patrol on her way to one of the weddings that have absurdly, miraculously persisted through all the bombings and invasions. Her picturesque magic is perfunctorily and, one feels, irretrievably erased from the world.

  Of the author’s status within post-war Albania, we know only what the copyright page tells us—that Chronicle in Stone (Kronikë në gur) was originally published in Tiranë, the forbidding little country’s capital, in 1971. Kadare takes us into the bosom of a land where all but a few Westerners are denied entry, and makes little of Albania’s Muslim-tinged exoticism—the mosques, the fezzes, the orthographically strange names like Xhexho, Selfixhe, and Vehip Qorri. Rather, his stone city emerges as a persuasive analogue for anyone’s childhood—friendly even in its mysteries, precious even in its recollected hardships and barbarities. Nostalgic reminiscence, of course, is one of the safer havens for a creative writer under a totalitarian regime (others are translation, children’s stories, and historical fiction). Ismail Kadare, the jacket flap tells us, after first finding fame as a poet, “has mined medieval and modern historical events, legend and reality,” in the writing of nine novels. It will be interesting to see, as these novels are translated into English, whether they maintain the superb balance and unforced amplitude of this one or slip, under the pressures of a watchful regime, into false naïveté and prudent stylization.

  Baltasar and Blimunda, by José Saramago, also comes from a small European country, and partakes of magic realism, that now wid
ely available elixir. Admirable and sweetly melancholy as this ambitious, panoramic novel often is, its magical freedom from realistic constraints, bestowed upon events of the historical rather than remembered past, permits the author to indulge himself in a great many flourishes of rather baffling intent. Moving between present and past tense, and between the royal court and the plebeian realm of workmen and vagabonds, the novel seems to be telling us something about Portugal, its great inequalities and pious cruelties, with an undercurrent of outrage that an effervescent love story keeps diluting. Its time runs from 1711 to 1739, all during the reign of João V, and its central historical event is the King’s agreeing to build, in accordance with a bargain struck with the Franciscans, a convent in the town of Mafra, provided the Franciscans’ prayers induce his Queen, Maria Ana of Austria, to bear him an heir within a year. She does, and the labor of building the extensive convent begins, described by the author in the kind of zealous pro-labor-force detail we might find on a Mexican mural. The transportation of a giant flagstone, thirty-five spans long, fifteen spans wide, and four spans deep (bigger than a bread-box), and weighing thirty-one tons, from the quarry to the site where it will serve as the convent’s portico takes six hundred men, four hundred oxen, eight days, and twenty-two pages to move three leagues. The point of all this logistical description seems to be that kings of old made their subjects perform onerous and vainglorious tasks: “The Convent of Mafra was built by Dom João V in fulfillment of a vow he made should God grant him an heir. Here go six hundred men who did not make the Queen pregnant yet pay for that vow by bearing the burden.”

  Amid this work force is our hero, Baltasar Mateus, nicknamed Sete-Sóis (Seven-Suns), whom we first meet when he is twenty-six years of age—a soldier returning from an engagement with the Spanish cavalry, his left hand having been so shattered by gunfire that it had to be amputated. While idly watching an auto-da-fé in Lisbon, he is accosted by a nineteen-year-old woman, Blimunda, with changeable eyes and a gift, when she has been fasting, of seeing into people, to their tumors and fetuses and essences. She is accompanied by a priest, Bartolomeu Lourenço—a historical figure, who is famous for having invented a flying machine named, since it resembles a giant bird, the Passarola. Blimunda asks Baltasar his name, takes him home with her, sleeps with him, and draws a cross on his chest with her virgin’s blood. The idyll of their faithful love continues to the day of his death, twenty-eight years later. How it and the additional marvel of Padre Bartolomeu’s flying device (it works on the principle of balls of sun-activated amber exercising attraction upon bottled quantities of human wills, which are small dark clouds; these then attract magnets that lift the metal body of the airship) fit into the novel’s indictment of corruption and extravagance in all-too-Catholic eighteenth-century Portugal remains, so to speak, up in the air.

  Saramago likes to describe ceremonies, pageants, and processions. His prose takes on a stiff, brocaded quality:

  The King arrived at half past eight after drinking his morning cup of chocolate, which the Visconde himself served. The royal procession then set out, headed by sixty-four Franciscan friars followed by all the clergy of the region; then came the patriarchal cross, six attendants dressed in red capes, the musicians, the chaplains in their surplices, and representatives from every conceivable order. Then there was a gap to prepare the crowd for what followed, the canons of the chapter wearing their cloaks, some in white linen, others embroidered, and each canon with his personal attendant, chosen from the nobility, walking before him, and his trainbearer behind; then came the Patriarch, wearing sumptuous vestments and a priceless miter encrusted with precious stones from Brazil.…

  Such pomp crushes, enforcing the reign of the clerisy and the aristocracy. Yet men are equal, in many ways: bedbugs bite the King, and “His Majesty’s blood tastes no better or worse than that of the other inhabitants of the city, whether blue or otherwise”; the Infanta “pouts and bites her lip” like “any other child her age, whether born in a palace or anywhere else”; death takes royal infants along with others; “Lent, like the rising sun, is a season for everyone”; and all men throw cherry pits on the ground—“It is little things like these that make us realize that all men are equal.” The curiously wandering, disembodied authorial voice is now inside the King, thinking with him, and now far outside, delivering an anti-royalist diatribe. Is the author trying to incite the citizens of eighteenth-century Portugal to overthrow the monarchy? If so, he comes a bit late. Perhaps some modern indictment is implied, of Portugal as a national case of arrested development: “Foreigners find us an easy target for jokes.… Our stupidity is clear for all to see, without recourse to Blimunda’s visionary powers”; “Never has there been a nation so staunch in its faith yet so disorderly.” The glorious past, as conjured up, seems an incubus, an ornate burden, a procession of stately vanity and hypocritical piety.

  The great convent at Mafra is not the only construction in the book: Padre Bartolomeu’s mechanical bird is assembled and maintained and finally flown, and the common-law marriage of Baltasar and Blimunda is a marvellous contraption of another kind. Built upon that imperious encounter when she asks his name and then signs him with her blood, it endures by the magic of sex and the mutual strangeness of his one-handedness and her clairvoyant, volatile eyes—“their coloring uncertain, gray, green, or blue, according to the outer light or the inner thought. Sometimes they even turn as black as night or a brilliant white, like a splinter of anthracite.” They are Adam and Eve before complications set in; the couple have no children, and no privation or parting ever calls them out of the garden of themselves. Even into decaying middle age they kiss with the ardor of young lovers: “Those poor mouths, their bloom gone, with some teeth missing and others broken, but in the end it is love that prevails.” Since they undergo no failures but simply persist as an enchanting demonstration of erotic success, and since the work of building the great convent can only plod along, readerly suspense must attach to the Passarola, which is most amusingly evoked, in its spooky mechanics and in its one brief interlude of flight. However, it is never deliberately flown again; its inventor, harried by fear of the Inquisition, succumbs to depression and goes to Toledo and dies, and Baltasar and Blimunda, though privy to its operating principles, merely hide the Passarola and tend it year after year. The flying machine, like this finespun novel, has nowhere special to go, and stays earthbound, balls of amber and bottled wills and magic realism and all.

  There is a powerful negative impulse pulling at José Saramago’s airy, wry poetry. His strangest literary habit is to disown thoughts and words that have flown out of his characters: “Who knows why such thoughts should occur to these rustics, for they are all illiterate except João Anes, who has had some education”; “This couple can neither write nor read, yet they can say things that seem most unlikely at such a time and in such a place”; “These are similes invented by someone who is writing on behalf of a soldier who fought in the war. Baltasar did not invent them.” And, most confessionally: “Blimunda was clearly incapable of such subtle thoughts; therefore, we are perhaps not inside these people and cannot tell what they are thinking.” For all its lovely color and imposing panoply of historical detail, Baltasar and Blimunda does somehow lack an inside; King and Queen and priest and lovers and even Domenico Scarlatti are paraded past us without our quite knowing what we are supposed to make of their embellished opacity. In this the novel sharply contrasts with Chronicle in Stone, whose exotica are rendered, through a child’s eyes, intimate and familiar. At one point, Blimunda looks clairvoyantly at the Sacred Host and sees not Christ but “a dark cloud.” A dark cloud lurks at the center of this superficially buoyant and festive narrative: “Human existence is so miserable,” the narrator reflects toward the end. Queen Maria is shown counselling her daughter the Infanta: “The longer you live the more you will realize that the world is like a great shadow pervading our hearts. That is why the world seems so empty and eventually becomes unbearable.” Thi
s emptiness translates into a novelistic inertness, a frozen tableau vivant.

  Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns

  CITIES OF SALT, by Abdelrahman Munif, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux. 627 pp. Random House, 1988.

  ARABESQUES, by Anton Shammas, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. 263 pp. Harper & Row, 1988.

  The most fabulous geological event since the explosion of Krakatoa surely was the discovery of oceans of petroleum beneath the stark and backward Muslim realms of the Persian Gulf. Sheiks whose wealth was previously measured in horses and camels soon ranked with the world’s richest men; dusty remotenesses like Kuwait and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia became able, with scarcely a dent in their national revenues, to shower all the blessings of an advanced welfare state upon their sparse populations. According to The World Almanac, the highest per-capita income on the planet belongs not to the United States or Sweden or Japan but to Qatar. The Western view of this global caprice is expressed by resentful caricatures of dollar-glutted sheiks and by our nervous protective naval presence in the Persian Gulf. The Arab view receives less publicity; Cities of Salt performs a needed service in dramatizing the impact of American oil discovery and development upon an unnamed Gulf emirate in the 1930s. It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Abdelrahman Munif, a Saudi born in Jordan, appears to be—though he lives in France and received a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade—insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds with a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure acquires enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest; and, this being the first third of a trilogy, what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved. There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which, since Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle; Cities of Salt is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate. Its focus might be described as sociological, and its sociological point as the single insistent one that Arabs are discomfited, distressed, and deranged by the presence of Americans in their midst. In over six hundred pages, repeated illustration of this point wears thin.